Double digit growth for Middle East security market

Regional security expenditure grew by 35% in 2007 says Gartner

Worldwide security revenues saw almost 20% growth in 2007 as revenues reached $10.4 billion. According to research analysts Gartner, this was due to large chunk of budgets going towards appliance based products.

"Compliance, data leakage and privacy issues, along with the need to tackle the fast evolving and sophisticated threat environment, are among the major drivers fuelling the growth of spending on security," said Ruggero Contu, principal research analyst at Gartner.

The Middle East was in second place behind South America as far as the rate of growth was concerned, with an increase of 35%. However, the more established markets in North America and Western Europe continued to dominate the market share.

E-mail security and secure web gateway markets were amongst the more prominent segments that affected the worldwide increase. Also bolstering growth were e-mail security boundary appliance and security information and event management (SIEM) with 45.4% and 32.1% increases in 2007, respectively.

"Compliance is the primary driver for the adoption of SIEM tools. At the same time they are also adopted to tackle the increasing threats from targeted attacks and fraud," Contu said. "In addition, the liability that spam and malware have on corporate systems is among the key issues driving spending on e-mail security boundary tools."

Gartner's research showed enterprise antivirus and web access management (WAM) to be the slowest performing segments. They found that enterprise antivirus is gradually decreasing as a stand alone purchase in favour of broader endpoint security platforms, where antivirus is only one of the required components.

From a vendor standpoint the figures for 2007 show that Symantec and McAfee remained the leading players holding 26.6% and 11.8% market share respectively. There was huge growth for EMC as it more than tripled its revenue year-on-year and saw its performance primarily influenced as a result of the company's recent acquisitions.

"Prioritisation, selection and maintenance of technology continues to be a major issue for organisations because of pressure from government agencies and industry standards to demonstrate compliance with the spirit and the letter of the law under various regulatory requirements. They also need to show business value and cost-effectiveness for security measures," said Contu.

Contu concluded by saying, "Price competition among vendors is also bringing prices down in the more-mature stand-alone market segments, such as antivirus. Changes in the way vendors package and price their solutions in the future will ultimately impact pricing and make some security technologies as pervasive as PCs."